Wireless Software and Hardware Platforms for Flexible and Unified Radio and Network Control (WiSHFUL)
Nicholas J. Kaminski, Spilios Giannoulis, Ilenia Tinnirello, Peter Ruckebusch, Piotr Gawłowicz, Domenico Garlisi, Jan Bauwens, Anatolij Zubow, R Leblon, Pierluigi Gallo, Ivan Seskar, Luiz A. DaSilva, Sunghyun Choi, José Ferreira de Rezende, Ingrid Moerman · River Publishers eBooks · 2022
In the last years, we have assisted to an impressive evolution of wireless technologies for short distance communication (like IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.4. Bluetooth Low Energy, etc.) due to the need of coping with the heterogeneous requirements of emerging applications, such as Internet of things, the Industry 4.0, the Tactile Internet, the ambient assistant living, and so on. Indeed, for optimizing the technology performance in these scenarios, it is often required to support some forms of protocol adaptation , by allowing the dynamic reconfiguration of protocol parameters and the dynamic activation of optional mechanisms, or some targeted protocol extensions . In both cases, prototyping, testing and experimentally validating potential solutions is a complex task, which generally requires significant time and resource investment. On one side, off-the-shelf wireless interfaces are based on radio chips which implement only the obligatory parts of the standards and arbitrarily selected optional parts, with only partially documented interfaces and with drivers being either closed or limited in functionality. On the other side, many powerful Software Defined Radio (SDR) platforms, while offering excellent flexibility at the physical layer, typically have limited performance and lack high-level specifications and programming tools as well as standard APIs for developing protocols.